The ndscape passed with wonderful slowness. Tara and Regina, along with Drat, scouted the areas beyond while the sun began to descend toward an amazing sunset.

  Being away from the city, and specifically the castle, had a freeing effect on both me and the rest of the team. Only Drat and Trent seemed unaffected by the smiling sunshine, the endless grassnds, the purple mountains majesty in the distance, and the trees that seemed to be in the midst of posing for a photo every time you looked at them.

  The grassnds gave way to rolling hills, and the trees seemed to be gathered to greet us as we crested the rgest hill, some three hours into the journey.

  “I never get tired of this,” Cinzy said.

  I cast a gnce at her, then stared. She had tied an already revealing pale yellow shirt up at the waist. This pushed her boobs up, creating a deep cleavage, and also her nipples poked clearly through the thin fabric. Her belly button was now also showing. She’d had a short but flowing skirt, and whenever she walked it bounced dangerously up and down. And the kicker: she had knee high bck steel-toed boots on.

  The magic everywhere in this world had begun to change her, and she was more than a full day into not taking the daily suppressant pill. Her skin was… all the colors. Of earth anyway. She had patches of creamy white, darker sepia, and nearly midnight bck. These slowly shifted into different colors and shapes as well. Right now she had a darker patch right at her colrbone and the hollow of her throat. I wanted to kiss it.

  “Me neither,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the delicious woman standing next to me. I had Regina and Tara. “I mean, I’ve only been here for a couple weeks, but I can’t see myself getting tired of it.”

  “Out of curiosity, why’d you choose me for your team?” she asked idly.

  “Oh, because I wanted one of everything, and there were only two Bards that applied. You were a much better fit for the team.”

  “What do you mean by better fit?”

  “I got a lot of applicants who were pushy and entitled. People who lost their temper in the interviews. There were some who wanted out of the stuffy confines of the city—”

  “I’m definitely one of those,” she said, interrupting me from listing all the things she wasn’t.

  “Not for the same reasons. Those guys wanted out so they didn’t have to follow any rules or be accountable to anyone. Least of all me.” When she made a considering sound in her throat, I continued. “I get it… there’s complete freedom here. You can do anything you want, essentially. You get magic powers. The Guards can leap tall buildings in a single bound. The one guy intimidated me with some kind of shout power. So they want to go out and treat this pce like a video game. They want to grind out monster kills.”

  “The hiring process should weed those ones out,” she responded.

  “That’s a nice wish. It’s easy to say you’re virtuous and wouldn’t turn a new pce into might makes right world, where everyone pays tribute to you and you take women as sex sves, and the only work you ever have to do is scare and hurt people. But it’s seductive to just sit on a pyramid made of sve bor if you have the sharpest spear.”

  Cinzy stopped and gave me a long look. That patch at her throat that looked so kissable melted away into Mediterranean sienna, while the left half of her face darkened to a reddish brown. Her eyes were fathomless dark brown, though. She seemed to stare into my soul.

  I squashed my instinct to ask her what she was thinking. She would vocalize it, or she wouldn’t.

  Also, if we’re being honest with ourselves, I was pretty intimidated by her. Both Regina and Tara were probably the best looking girls at a party, but Cinzy was the best looking girl in your whole school. The type of girl who could have become an actress, model, influencer, that kind of thing. Before this new job and this new world (and the new body Physicality was giving me) I would’ve put myself at a 4/10, a generous 4/10. Imagining that the most beautiful woman in the world is a 10, I’d put Cinzy at an 8, possibly a 9. She was way out of my league, like way way way way (infinity ways) beyond my reach.

  “Did you want to meet Fairy Poppins?” she asked.

  “Absolutely!”

  A teensy fairy popped out of her traveling bag, looking like a dragonfly that glowed from within.

  I gasped and made a sound of astonishment. “You are just the cutest!”

  I held out my finger and the little person nded directly on it, standing up and waving.

  “Well hello to you too.” I goggled a bit, before turning back to Cinzy. “I have a lot of questions.”

  She just ughed.

  “Never mind. I’ll just stand here gobsmacked.”

  She nearly doubled over ughing. Meanwhile Fairy Poppins took to the air, went around my outstretched hand several times, and doused me with fairy dust.

  Durability check: You have been fairy dusted. You do not have the associated skill for this check. This check is Very Difficult. Would you like to spend 6 Tokens for an automatic success?

  Total Tokens: 5 Durability and 6 Free Tokens.

  “What happens if I don’t succeed at this Durability check?”

  Cinzy squinted at Fairy Poppins. “Bad Fairy Poppins! You’re going back in the bag and not coming out tonight if you can’t be good.” Turning to me, she said, “I’ll lower the difficulty on the check.”

  “Just curious,” I told her, though I was beginning to feel the effects. A timer was running out on my ability to pass the check by my lonesome. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing this without Tokens.

  Suddenly the cost of passing the test with Tokens was down to 2, so I paid out the Tokens and the buzzing feeling in my mind and in my teeth lessened. A general euphoria had started to steal over me.

  “You end up feeling high,” she said, “and it has a truth telling effect. So it’s like a truth serum. As a bonus, you also get a couple of highly boosted Resistances.”

  “That sounds good.”

  She nodded. “It definitely has its pce. I can’t believe she’s trying to interview you right back.”

  “What?”

  “She’s being protective.”

  The little Nakamamon was trying to protect her bonded human by feeling me out under the influence of a truth serum. It was kind of adorable and a little worrisome at the same time. I tried to ugh it off, and noticed a fshing bit in my periphery.

  Achievement: Nakamamon Explorer

  10 Nakamamon encountered

  What mysterious and amazing creatures they are! You have only begun to see the wider world.

  Reward: +1 skill point

  Was it ten already? I hadn’t been counting. If there was a catalogue of Nakamamon I hadn’t found one.

  “I like you,” she said suddenly.

  “I like you too, which is why I chose you for this expedition. If you, by chance, use whatever mental or emotional powers to take over the expedition and set yourself up as liege lord over the whole countryside, and make people build you enormous pyramids through sve bor, I tell you what, I’ll be severely disappointed.”

  Here she ughed.

  “You don’t happen to have a girlfriend, do you?” she asked.

  “Lots of girls who are my friends,” I told her truthfully. “No one I’m specifically dating, no.”

  I knew this was threading the needle of truth. I also knew that, for reasons Regina alone had, she was keen on me having other sexual partners. One of those reasons was lust. She was very keenly interested in having a hand in getting me id by other people. With Tara, I couldn’t rightly say. She might’ve been interested in being my girlfriend, but she hadn’t made any of her wishes clear. I needed to approach her like I’d done with Regina and figure things out, especially if the unthinkable kept coming up, and women kept hitting on me.

  “You’re not insinuating that you’re in the market for a boyfriend, are you?” I asked, and she grinned that magically glowing grin of hers.

  Cinzy’s eyes grew huge. “Why no! I would never insinuate such a thing. I would outright state certain things I was interested in doing.”

  “Such as?”

  “Going out on a date, for one.”

  I peered around, smiling so broadly my face began to hurt. I had to keep it on my face or else I’d give away my utter astonishment. “I’m afraid there aren’t many romantic bars or restaurants nearby. Shall I take you out to dinner once we find something appropriate?”

  I had to squash the notion that she was only doing this in order to get my ear. She was interested in me. Yeah, definitely only that and nothing else. She wasn’t interested at all in having the ear of the expedition leader.

  She quickly squeezed my hand, chuckling. “Something appropriate would be lovely.”

  “It’s a date…” I said, “sometime in the future… at a location to be determined.”

  ~2~

  We made camp in the shade of a boogie tree. An had a spell for this, and pitched his tent in a cloud of glowing purple magic. Or rather, it pitched itself after he said the correct words and waved his fingers the right way. Isabelle y there while Ivy and Larelle threw their tent together.

  “I do not understand the housing situation,” Chrysta said. “Why is it we have forsaken the stone constructions with the hearths that contain the warm fires?”

  I was in the middle of setting out my tent materials. I’d only done this once in training. I wasn’t much of a hiking person, so I also wasn’t much of an outdoorsy person. Or I hadn’t been, anyway.

  I sat there, massaging the pain out of my legs, watching as Regina and Tara set up another tent. Trent sulked nearby on a rock, stroking Garnet, who had pushed its head out of the dirt nearby. When I sauntered over, I let him know he had the ability to create his own earth igloo or whatever he wanted to do, provided it was far enough away from the other tents. We had a lot of people who didn’t trust his powers after today.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, rubbing his bandaged hand. “I’ve never lost control like that. I swear something bit me.”

  I nodded. “Sorry, man. It’s going to take some doing before we get you using your abilities freestyle like that again. It was a bad move pying with people like that.”

  He nodded, forlorn. Soon though, his hands started glowing vaguely green and a bit brown. Soon a number of earthen bricks had torn themselves out of a central circle, and were stacking up outside of that circle. He had an igloo made of earth about eight feet high and ten feet across, with the floor a good three feet under ground level, in just under two minutes.

  “You want me to look at your injury?” I asked.

  “Nah. I’ll just take it easy and wait for you guys to ask me for help on stuff.”

  “I want your ideas, too. When it comes time, your knowledge of your abilities is going to help us in ways I can’t even imagine.”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything further. Instead he headed into the igloo’s small opening and disappeared. Garnet vanished into the dirt and a tiny rumble could be heard as it tunneled to be with him.

  It took me something like fifteen minutes to set up my own tent. I eventually had to agree to Chrysta’s assistance. The ghost Nakamamon had a seemingly limitless number of hands, so she could tie things up, hold the stakes, wield the mallet, and keep everything taut at the same time. I was depressingly little help in the matter.

  Still, just after finishing, I received word that I’d gotten a skill point in Outdoorsman skills.

  Opening this up, I found a skill for Hiking, Trekking, Trapping, Wilderness Survival, Fishing, and a whole litany of others. It was like my own Healer skill list all over again. I had no doubt a lot of these were on the Rangers’ skill lists.

  It was interesting that I couldn’t just get these skills at character creation, but they became avaible through practice and messing up. Again, failure seemed to be an excellent teacher.

  The UI informed me that I could have an extra rank if I put the skill into Hiking or Wilderness Survival (Temperate).

  We were probably going to be doing an absolute shit ton of hiking, so I put the first point there, and grinned at the silliness of it. I didn’t feel any different. No shower of sparks or halo of magical lights, no magical girl transformation gave me better hiking boots, a camp stove and a bunch of clips and pockets.

  Still, there was now a pce on my character sheet that read Hiking 2. Nice.

  We ate and had a long conversation about what we suspected was going on over on earth right now. I told them that I hoped my sister reached out to my parents, because my nephew was really cute and they hadn’t seen her much. This got a lot of oohs and aahs, and annoyed curses at the magic saturation of this world that it would completely wreck photographs. So I promised to have one etched in stone so they could see my cute nephew.

  “You better not boast about that kind of thing,” Tara said sternly. “I like adorable kids.”

  “He’s a toddler,” I said.

  I didn’t matter that I didn’t describe him, they all cooed over him being just a wee little guy.

  Cinzy talked about how she was so gd to get this job, and everybody else nodded along.

  “The first few weeks were tough,” she said. “But I’m grateful. There’s no drugs here. I just can’t get it, so I’m clean. And it’s been three months now.”

  “Hell yeah, girl,” Tara said, and fist bumped her.

  An had his stuttering. Isabelle confessed she had crushing depression, and hadn’t actually submitted an application; Ivy had. Ivy applied after Izzy got the job, which was good because she’d gotten doxxed by a cssmate-ssh-enemy, and had deep fake porn of herself doing a dozen guys posted online.

  “It got pretty fracking ugly,” she said. “We had to move. I had stuff posted all over my locker. I got assaulted.” A group of guys boxed her into a ring in the hallway and they groped her before a teacher broke things up. Then her dark expression cleared and she beamed a huge smile at Isabelle.

  “Fresh start,” Isabelle said.

  “Fresh start,” Ivy echoed.

  Tara said things weren’t easy back home but, amazingly, didn’t eborate. Maybe with one person she could open up easy… and talk ceaselessly regardless of your familiarity with her and her life. Now she quieted after a single sentence. Nobody pushed.

  “Regina?” Cinzy asked.

  Regina smiled sadly, staring into the cook fire. “Yeah.”

  “Oh? Bad?”

  Regina just nodded, and nuzzled Tweedle Dee. The fox with the multiple tails pressed his forehead to Regina’s face and absorbed her tears.

  “Sounds worse than mine.”

  Regina shrugged. “It’s not a contest, but it was bad. Like human trafficking bad.”

  “Oh,” Cinzy said sadly. The girls all came over and hugged Regina, forming a human bnket. Fairy Poppins poked her tiny head out of Cinzy’s bag and chirped a tiny squeaking noise, but Cinzy waved her down. Yes, euphoria probably would’ve been good, but not with the truth serum effect.

  “Drat?” I asked, then looked around. I could’ve sworn Drat was there, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. An nodded over toward where a figure was disappearing into the darkness beyond the light of the campfire.

  Trent’s name was not brought up.

  “Larelle?” I asked.

  “Hm?”

  “Could I ask how you came to be employed in the city?”

  The enormous woman with the no nose and the acres and acres of hair sat in thought for a few moments. They came and asked.

  And that was all we got out of her. She volunteered to take first watch a moment ter, stood, and began circling the perimeter.

  “Did you all meet Dick Johnson?” I asked. A chorus of snorts erupted. “Is that his real name?”

  “Amazing, I know,” Isabelle said. “I wouldn’t have gone to the interview at all except he didn’t give his name until we were there.”

  “Same,” Tara said.

  The talk turned to other matters, eventually died down, and watch shifts were discussed before everyone drifted off to their tents.

  That night, I ended up having not one, but two visitors.

  This is Christopher waking up to his first ever threesome.